Tagged With main belt

Is it an asteroid? A comet? Both? Observations by the Hubble Space Telescope are revealing new details about a strange binary asteroid that's performing double-duty as a comet. It's the first time scientists have ever seen such a thing.

For billions of years, the Solar System's asteroids have been involved in an endless game of bumper cars, smashing into each other and splintering into smaller bits. But get this -- astronomers have just detected a clump of asteroids that has managed, quite miraculously, to stay intact since they first formed some four billion years ago. The discovery is revealing new insights into what our Solar System looked like during its earliest phase.